#Old laptop, need tips

1 messages ยท Page 1 of 1 (latest)

unique garnet
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So because my laptop is old (2012, with an i3), i probably dont want my file system encrypted. Im not concerned with any physical security (this laptop is always home), so is not encrypting it fine? I would also be spooked by the cpu mitigations, it likely will turn performance into being non-existent, so could i do something about that if needed? And would those changes stay around after updates?

spiral cove
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so is not encrypting it fine?

Fine by what measure? You preeempted your question with a set of conditions, implying you think it's fine, and then asked if it's fine.

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it likely will turn performance into being non-existent

nosmt in particular may, although generally only for multithreaded workflows

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so could i do something about that if needed?

kargs are only set by the user anyways, they aren't part of the image

unique garnet
spiral cove
unique garnet
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I just want to make sure i do everything properly even if i might know the answers

spiral cove
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note that auto still sets all other mitigations, and this is the default kernel behavior for all linux distros

unique garnet
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so i run all those commands myself and remove nosmt?

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i will run the harden kargs command without nosmt

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what does harden flatpak do?

spiral cove
spiral cove
unique garnet
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Alright thanks

spiral cove
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lmk if you have any other questions

unique garnet
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Got a couple new questions:
If i wanted Brave (dont know yet), do i just layer it on or does it have some issues?

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Is there a specific DNS set? And how would i change it myself

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And syncthing, so about this and brave the question would be should i not be afraid of layering stuff, is it just fine (of course prefering flatpaks when able)

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in the faq it also says i can use nix before considering layering it. So that would be the answer? I havent explored nix stuff yet, so im hoping it would be verifiable

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And hopefully last question: Should i wait until fedora 40 or does it not matter

unique garnet
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Ok i figured out "auditing" nix package sources

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So i guess its like flatpak (unless it breaks something) > nix > rpm layering

unique garnet
spiral cove
spiral cove
spiral cove
unique garnet
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Only question left is how do i change the DNS, is it just like normal by changing systemd resolved config?

spiral cove
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Should i wait until fedora 40 or does it not matter

wait due to what?

unique garnet
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Well bluefin considers itself beta until fedora 40 because of something, but i guess it doesnt apply here

unique garnet
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and sorry i have more questions:

  1. If i wanted to change around kargs, do i just run the command again with what i want exactly or do i have to specify removing some things if i wanted to remove things
  2. If i wanted to change desktop environment, do i just rebase? Are there going to be potential problems with that? Maybe like config conflicts
spiral cove
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if that nameserver supports DoT, then it will work

spiral cove
spiral cove
unique garnet
spiral cove
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so no, you can't just rerun the same command

unique garnet
spiral cove
unique garnet
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Alright thanks

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I probably will install secureblue tomorrow

unique garnet
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Do you think my 2012 i3 can run toolbox containers?

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or podman, whatever it uses

unique garnet
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It's quite weak so, sure

unique garnet
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is chromium just from fedora repos? Does it have vanadium patches?

spiral cove
# unique garnet is chromium just from fedora repos? Does it have vanadium patches?

is chromium just from fedora repos?

yes

Does it have vanadium patches?

no but per the readme we've gotten upstream fedora chromium to configure the build flags with the same secure config that vanadium uses. Plus all of the switches and policies we apply. It's not identical to vanadium but also a good number of the vanadium packages are for android only anyways

unique garnet
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So it has everything desktop can have from vanadium?

spiral cove
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There are probably some differences, and so we would need to ask upstream to add those patches to the build

unique garnet
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Yeah hopefully they do that

spiral cove
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so far I've only requested build flags that are already done by Chrome / Vanadium

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making a desktop build of vanadium is also an option, however it's a huge endeavour that would need its own project

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building chromium on copr takes 20+ hours ๐Ÿ™‚

unique garnet
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Oh that's a lot more than I expected ๐Ÿ˜ฌ

spiral cove
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chromium is large

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the codebase alone is over 100GB

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just in text files

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๐Ÿ™‚

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also, there are other benefits to using upstream Fedora's chromium

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one is: more eyes on the codebase

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if we're maintaining our own desktop vanadium fork, there are few eyes on the code

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and in a similar vein, if we use upstream fedora, there are way way more users and so more bug reports

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and generally a higher quality product in the end

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also, the critical pieces already have parity, like enabling CFI which we asked upstream to do and they did it

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I would need to go do an analysis of all the patches in vanadium, remove all the android ones, and then see which if any are remaining compared to fedora chromium

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i suspect it's not terribly significant

unique garnet
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Yeah that's what I wanted to ask

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Just the patches files?

spiral cove
spiral cove
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since those just change the base project's code and then build it

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so we'd need to narrow down what specifically is missing that's relevant to desktop and relevant to security

unique garnet
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I don't really trust myself on such an important thing but I'll take a peek maybe just to educate myself

spiral cove
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maybe I should make a vanadium_comparison.readme.md or something with a big table of all the changes vanadium makes and whether they're relevant and if they're relevant how we accomplish them

unique garnet
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That would be good for the faq

spiral cove
unique garnet
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I will do it tomorrow night

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Right now it's also night, and tomorrow I will be busy

spiral cove
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ok

unique garnet
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But I will get a free window to use my laptop

spiral cove
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thanks

unique garnet
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Thank you for making this cool thing

unique garnet
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I get forbidden status code when I try to rebase to kinoite-nvidia-laptop-userns-hardened

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Nevermind I have misspelled kinoite every single time in my life

unique garnet
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And my updating issue seems to be network speed. Also when I downloaded the source code of something huge from GitHub it kept interrupting the connection probably cuz my router is so bad. So maybe that could happen when updating too? It doesn't stop though

unique garnet
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Rebasing to unsigned image gave me "child process killed by signal 4" error when it was sanity checking final rootfs

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Doing it again says it's the same refs so I guess that's fine

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Running rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/secureblue/kinoite-nvidia-laptop-userns-hardened:latest gives me "preparing import: fetching manifest: containers-policy.json specifies default of insecureAcceptAnything; refusing usage

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Well what do I do about sanity-checking: final rootfs: bwrap(/usr/bin/true): child process killed by signal 4

spiral cove
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it usually indicates hardware incompatibilities

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ive only ever seen it once and it was someone using an old business machine with ECC memory which hardened_malloc doesn't support

unique garnet
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I'm gonna try without Nvidia since I know Nvidia doesn't want to exist for me

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Yeah but I think this motherboard's Nvidia implementation is windows exclusive

spiral cove
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what kind of machine is this

unique garnet
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Asus k53S laptop

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Also fails without nvidia

spiral cove
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try the asus images

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also, are you able to rebase to ublue?

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what image are you currently on

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rpm-ostree status

unique garnet
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There's Asus images?

unique garnet
spiral cove
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to make sure it's a secureblue issue

unique garnet
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Alright

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I also have the unverified image on there but I don't thinks it's used, do I have to remove it somehow?

unique garnet
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On rpm-ostree status

spiral cove
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if you didn't pin any deployments, you dont need to do anything

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just rebase to ublue unverified then to signed

unique garnet
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Ok I will run rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest

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The unverified one first

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ublue seems to have worked

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Well I didn't reboot yet or rebased to signed image

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But it said a bunch of stuff is queued to apply

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I'm rebooting

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Yeah the dot is on unverified ublue

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This laptop is so scuffed

spiral cove
spiral cove
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if after that and a reboot and the rebase to secureblue still fails with the bwrap validation issue, there's almost certainly a hardware incompatibility of some kind and we'll have to try to figure out what it is

unique garnet
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Alright

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I am on signed ublue

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Rebasing to unsigned secureblue

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Bwrap issue

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Sanity-checking final rootfs: bwrap(/usr/bin/true): Child process killed by signal 4

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Gonna investigate tomorrow ๐Ÿซก

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Can we find out?

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I don't think I can take out anything though

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So then what do I do about it

spiral cove
# unique garnet Can we find out?

It will be tough. We'd have to incrementally add components into a custom build until it breaks to narrow down the issue. @jaunty steeple you have an image with partial changes right? we could start with that

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what's the difference between your build and secureblue

unique garnet
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So I'm gonna be making a custom image? I'm fine with that if I have some help which the ublue community seems to be pretty cool about. But our timezones seem to be opposites so not now but we can plan

spiral cove
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step 1: identify which component is causing the issue
step 2: figure out a way to fix it, whether that's within secureblue or outside of it

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also can you send your hardware details especially for your ram

unique garnet
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You mean like kde system info stuff?

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My ram is a weird value

spiral cove
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of the hardware components

unique garnet
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So open it up and look?

spiral cove
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by googling it

unique garnet
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Alrighty then

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I'm finding everything except the brand that it uses out of the box. There's tons of different models and bad info, Asus doesn't even have it on their website anymore. I also suspect the memory may have been upgraded by my dad at some point

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It also definitely has different storage

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This is why I'm only ever gonna buy a framework

spiral cove
spiral cove
unique garnet
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I don't think it is

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Also ddr3 only with up to 1333MT/s so whatever's in here is just cheap

spiral cove
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it must be something else then

jaunty steeple
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Have you tried not using hardened malloc already?

spiral cove
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also @unique garnet can you put your rpm-ostree status here

spiral cove
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which means it's doing its job

unique garnet
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Well I can't now, I'm gonna do that tomorrow

spiral cove
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you can't what?

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are you not on that machine currently?

unique garnet
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No I'm on my phone

spiral cove
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oh okay

unique garnet
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Would it missing a battery cause problems?

spiral cove
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basically what I'd recommend is use startingpoint/bluebuild based on whatever ublue image you're currently on. Then add stuff from secureblue in order from most to least likely to cause problems (for example, hardened_malloc + the LD_PRELOAD is highly likely, chronyd changes are highly unlikely) until you get the same error

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then let me know which piece did it

unique garnet
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Yeah I'll try, hopefully it's fun

spiral cove
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it shouldn't take too long aside from the build times

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it's almost certainly either:

hardened_malloc+ld_preload
modules blacklist
sysctls

unique garnet
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Well apparently download speed is very bad for me

spiral cove
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that will also make it take longer lol

unique garnet
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I think my ISP is not cool

unique garnet
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Is secureblue just made from the fedora atomic images, and shouldn't i be just taking secureblue and removing things from it instead of adding everything incrementally

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Seems a lot faster

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Building ublue-kionite-nvidia

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Is there like some rule or can I abuse GitHub actions all I want

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This thing is kinda crazy, builds everything for free

spiral cove
unique garnet
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I'm figuring out the recipe stuff now

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Do I not have to add the gpg for the repos I add

spiral cove
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what repos

unique garnet
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When I add a repo to the rpm-ostree module

unique garnet
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I'm guessing I dont have to do anything with yafti

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Added hardened malloc and maybe LD preload hopefully

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Im guessing that would be the problem

spiral cove
spiral cove
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or you can just set verification to false, temporarily

spiral cove
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if you're able to rebase to an image with hmalloc, the next thing to check is the module blacklists

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and if it's that, then you need to figure out which one ๐Ÿ˜„

unique garnet
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Yeah that is the plan

unique garnet
spiral cove
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i don't remember where those go

unique garnet
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I mean like to have it installed when installing the image

spiral cove
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oh it's /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/

spiral cove
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you would need to ask in the ublue server

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you'd need to use optfix

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but for now can you just use chromium so we can find the issue source ๐Ÿ˜„

unique garnet
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Yeah I'm just gonna use whatever's on there, brave was a side quest

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Alright so it's hardened malloc

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Should I try without LD preload, and then without hardened malloc but the blacklist stuff

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Or is it definitely hardened malloc

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I'm going to try without hardened malloc and LD preload

spiral cove
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after you confirm that, you can also try with libhardened_malloc-light.so

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to see if that works

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also, wait

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what secureblue images did you try

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did you try any of the -main images?

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or just -nvidia?

unique garnet
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Yes

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I did main and nvidia

spiral cove
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ah okay

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I have a suggestion but it won't be fun

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basically

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rebase to ublue's kinoite-nvidia

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then layer hardened_malloc locally, and set the ld preload

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then reboot and see what fails

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and then boot back into the previous deployment

unique garnet
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I'm currently on ublue kinoite nvidia, so I'm gonna add hardened malloc

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Do I have to pin this deployment

spiral cove
unique garnet
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How would this be not fun?

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Rebooting now

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Well it works but it looked a bit interesting

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The terminal is more interesting

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The ld preload cannot be preloaded

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Ignored

spiral cove
spiral cove
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you were able to boot?

unique garnet
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ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.

spiral cove
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where is that error

unique garnet
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Many times in the terminal

spiral cove
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did you install it?

unique garnet
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Yeah it's installed

spiral cove
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what commands are you running

unique garnet
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I ran nothing and it was there already, I ran rpm-ostree status and it appeared there too but the command did run

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Status says nothing is currently layered on this deployment

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But it did install

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Nothing but that error still pops up

spiral cove
unique garnet
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That's quite weird cuz it didn't give an error during the install

spiral cove
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what command did you run to install it

unique garnet
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I put the repo in the yum repos directory and then just did rpm-ostree install hardened_malloc

spiral cove
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strange

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are you sure you booted into the new deployment and not the previous one

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what's the full output of rpm-ostree status

unique garnet
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It shows the one I have now with nothing on it and the previous one which had brave on it

spiral cove
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can you post it

unique garnet
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I'll get it

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How do I make a codeblock

spiral cove
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triple backticks

unique garnet
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kremzli@fedora:/var/home/kremzli$ rpm-ostree status
ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
State: idle
Warning: failed to finalize previous deployment
         error: Finalizing deployment: Finalizing SELinux policy: failed to run semodule: Child process exited with code 132
         check `journalctl -b -1 -u ostree-finalize-staged.service`
AutomaticUpdates: stage; rpm-ostreed-automatic.timer: no runs since boot
Deployments:
โ— ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest
                   Digest: sha256:0655cb4a189f802effee1844bd7ae190c17de4430b92496233bc4521524b531e
                  Version: 39.20240219.0 (2024-02-19T16:23:17Z)
spiral cove
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can you post the entire thing

unique garnet
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kremzli@fedora:/var/home/kremzli$ rpm-ostree status
ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
State: idle
Warning: failed to finalize previous deployment
         error: Finalizing deployment: Finalizing SELinux policy: failed to run semodule: Child process exited with code 132
         check `journalctl -b -1 -u ostree-finalize-staged.service`
AutomaticUpdates: stage; rpm-ostreed-automatic.timer: no runs since boot
Deployments:
โ— ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest
                   Digest: sha256:0655cb4a189f802effee1844bd7ae190c17de4430b92496233bc4521524b531e
                  Version: 39.20240219.0 (2024-02-19T16:23:17Z)

  ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest
                   Digest: sha256:0655cb4a189f802effee1844bd7ae190c17de4430b92496233bc4521524b531e
                  Version: 39.20240219.0 (2024-02-19T16:23:17Z)
          LayeredPackages: brave-browser
spiral cove
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ok now can you post journalctl -b -1 -u ostree-finalize-staged.service

unique garnet
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My message is too long

spiral cove
unique garnet
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What about a txt file

spiral cove
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pastebin strongly preferred

unique garnet
spiral cove
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hmm okay

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rpm-ostree install hardened_malloc again but this time don't reboot after

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just post rpm-ostree status after

unique garnet
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Alright

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kremzli@fedora:/var/home/kremzli$ rpm-ostree status
ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object 'libhardened_malloc.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
State: idle
Warning: failed to finalize previous deployment
         error: Finalizing deployment: Finalizing SELinux policy: failed to run semodule: Child process exited with code 132
         check `journalctl -b -1 -u ostree-finalize-staged.service`
AutomaticUpdates: stage; rpm-ostreed-automatic.timer: no runs since boot
Deployments:
  ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest
                   Digest: sha256:0655cb4a189f802effee1844bd7ae190c17de4430b92496233bc4521524b531e
                  Version: 39.20240219.0 (2024-02-19T16:23:17Z)
                     Diff: 1 added
          LayeredPackages: hardened_malloc

โ— ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest
                   Digest: sha256:0655cb4a189f802effee1844bd7ae190c17de4430b92496233bc4521524b531e
                  Version: 39.20240219.0 (2024-02-19T16:23:17Z)

  ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-asus-nvidia:latest
                   Digest: sha256:0655cb4a189f802effee1844bd7ae190c17de4430b92496233bc4521524b531e
                  Version: 39.20240219.0 (2024-02-19T16:23:17Z)
          LayeredPackages: brave-browser
spiral cove
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if you do so and it still shows hardened_malloc as not layered, I'll be at a loss

unique garnet
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well i dont see grub when i boot but ill see if hitting a key makes it show up

spiral cove
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but if after all this you still want to use secureblue, you'd have to use your custom image repo and just use secureblue as a base image and remove hardened_malloc

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you don't even have to remove the rpm tbh

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you can just overwrite the ld preload file

unique garnet
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Well I couldn't get grub to show up

spiral cove
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it defaults to 0

unique garnet
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Yeah

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It does have some very few errors but it's too fast

spiral cove
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what's rpm-ostree status now

unique garnet
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That top deployment doesn't exist anymore

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Just the clean and previous brave one

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And it says failed to run semodule: child process exited with code 132

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Failed to finalize previous deployment

spiral cove
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yeah something is very broken

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and the semodule error is truncated in the pastebin

unique garnet
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The journalctl thing?

unique garnet
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Do I just remove the ld preload file

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Ok it's installing hardened malloc again

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Yeah didn't work

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So I'm gonna just base on secureblue and override the ld preload file to have nothing in it? Or remove it, haven't seen that much documentation yet. Will do that tomorrow

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Does it auto update my repo?

spiral cove
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does what auto update it?

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bluebuild?

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yeah, just enable the workflow in github actions

unique garnet
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Like when you update, does my stuff update and build

spiral cove
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just enable it in actions

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if you haven't already

unique garnet
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Yeah I'll see

unique garnet
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Should I revoke permission for ublue image creator app

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I don't have to copy all the package removals and stuff right? Only add my own changes

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Yeah I dont

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Don't I have to do something for auto updating? Does bluebuild just set it up to update from my repo

unique garnet
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Is this name fine

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What about the changes to enable LD preload in flatpaks

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I mean would it just not work and I'd be fine?

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Finally it works

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I still get ld preload errors

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Even though there is no hardened_malloc or ld.so.preload file

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It wouldn't run with hardened_malloc without LD preload so I made it remove both

unique garnet
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Is that added in laptop images?

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Even though I don't have the ld.so.preload file it says it should be in

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I will do a fresh install maybe

unique garnet
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Should I go through yafti on the unverified image? Also it gets stuck at the flatpak setup, doesn't accept

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I also have no internet

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It connects to my wifi but it doesn't get internet

unique garnet
unique garnet
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Ok I had to set my own dns

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Epic router moment

unique garnet
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If I put an IP in kde DNS settings then it uses encrypted DNS over TLS right?

unique garnet
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But it's weird, chrome extension webstore's site can't be reached

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Not my DNS, only on chromium, other sites work fine

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I guess it isn't using my DNS

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It was recommended to get ublock origin lite so idk how I'm gonna get that

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I expect updates to be blocked too

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Nix isn't included?

jaunty steeple
jaunty steeple
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There are secure dns settings in chromium you may want to take a look at

unique garnet
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It's "managed by your administrator"

jaunty steeple
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Right

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Weird, it works on my machine with the default chromium settings

unique garnet
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Yeah idk the DNS is broken if I don't add it myself

jaunty steeple
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It really shouldn't be broken if your router provides dhcp

unique garnet
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It does, never broke until now

spiral cove
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Does bluebuild just set it up to update from my repo

spiral cove
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you don't need to do anything

unique garnet
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Well I had to do that

spiral cove
spiral cove
unique garnet
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Internet

spiral cove
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i asked two questions ๐Ÿ™‚

unique garnet
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I had to set the DNS on the system, it wouldn't pick it up from the router

spiral cove
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doesn't make sense but glad you got it fixed

unique garnet
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Ok that's true

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What dns does chromium have

spiral cove
unique garnet
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Well why does the extension store not work

spiral cove
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dns applies to your entire connection not just one application

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it's impossible to know why a specific component of a specific app isn't working without doing more investigation, it could be dozens of things

unique garnet
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Well I tested my DNS and it wasn't that

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Will test with other browser tomorrow

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Also yafti doesn't work for me, it just gets stuck at setup flatpak step

spiral cove
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gets stuck how?

unique garnet
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It just doesn't work, I press accept and it does nothing, I can go back but I can't go forward

spiral cove
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i would need a screen recording to fully understand

unique garnet
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I can do that tomorrow

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I would expect it's because it can't find the ld preload file so it just doesn't do anything

spiral cove
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ld preload gets ignored if it's missing so i doubt it

unique garnet
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How do I run it again?

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I tried before to type yafti in terminal and it said no config file or yafti. something

spiral cove
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yafti -f /usr/share/ublue-os/firstboot/yafti.yml

unique garnet
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Also is this name ok

spiral cove
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idc

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insecureblue would be funnier though ๐Ÿ˜„

unique garnet
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Will update it tomorrow